pings from the void

I’m giving a talk in a couple of months on the very weird state of the games industry. So I’ll be posting some info as I collect it. To begin, 2 giants of 2010 both with Craft in the name. Presenting the last 6 months of popular interest in Minecraft vs Starcraft. (The large peek in July is the Starcraft launch date)

Now ok, maybe that doesn’t really show what I’m getting at. After all there is this massive spike in interest in July for Starcraft that really skews the graph. The bit I’m interested in is the tail. So here’s the last 3 months instead.

I’m not really suggesting that you can compare the two games. They are two very different beasts that service two quite different markets. One’s made by a faceless team of hundreds another buy one guy (well there are 4 in the credits, more on that later). However both games come together in the audience’s attention span. I’m not sure if that’s an actual concept but it does sound legit. After all if you’re a gamer, it’s a good bet that you’ve have been exposed to both titles by now.

To me there are really interesting questions tied to the productions and finances of both of those games. I wonder if you looked at the per worker day investment of both teams and the financial return of both games. Which one would come up on top?

Next interesting point is the google search terms. My favourite bit is how “crack” and “cheat” appear twice in the Starcraft top 10 and they don’t even crack the list for Minecraft.